by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2024 | Information, Life After Prison, Newsletter, Prisons, Reviews
Experts Speak on Correction – Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, by Ben Austen
By Pam Gates and Sherry Reames
A good-sized crowd turned out on Feb. 1 to hear a panel organized by the UW Law School on issues surrounding parole: its pros and cons, how it works, how it doesn’t work, and how it could work. The panelists were journalist and author Ben Austen; Wisconsin ACLU staff attorney Emma Shakeshaft; John Tate II, Wisconsin Parole Commission chair 2019-’22, and Dant’e Cottingham, a former juvenile lifer who received parole during Tate’s term and is now associate director of EXPO. Professor Kate Finley of the UW Law School moderated this “dream panel,” as Austen described it.
When Finley asked Austen why he wrote this book, he answered: “It’s the 50-year mark for mass incarceration. We’re conditioned to not think about the prison system. But looking at parole shows you both the crime and all the subsequent time in prison. And what’s the point of all that time?” In the wide-ranging conversation that followed, the panelists returned repeatedly to this question, and to several related ones.
How are paroles granted (or not)? John Tate explained that an individual’s parole-eligibility date is given at sentencing. Once that date has passed, a parole commissioner evaluates each application for parole on the basis of the individual’s completion of required programs, in-prison conduct, release plan, and risk assessment if released, as well as the time served. The chair reviews the commissioner’s recommendation and makes a decision, sometimes release but most often deferral (apply again after a prescribed length of time). There is no appeal process.
How long are incarcerated people in Wisconsin waiting before parole? As Shakeshaft pointed out, almost everyone in Wisconsin who’s parole-eligible has been incarcerated since before 2000, when Wisconsin changed to Truth in Sentencing. Last year, 801 of those people applied for release on parole, but only 37 of them were allowed to go home. By contrast, over 400 were released under Tate’s leadership, from March 2020 to June 2022. “Covid gave the decision-makers courage,” Shakeshaft commented. Tate explained that Covid also gave him the opportunity to streamline the parole process.
What does parole achieve when the system works as intended? “Do we want parole?” Austen asked. “Will it make our society more just? There are hundreds of thousands of people living in the system, serving extremely long sentences. Parole offers moments of grace and miracle. We need systems of second chances.”
The possibility of parole can provide prisoners with hope and motivation to change. Cottingham called it “a blessing and a miracle” that he himself is now free, after serving 27 years for a crime at age 17, but he also made it clear that he turned his life around during those years. “Under [Wisconsin’s] old law,” he explained, “there were incentives to do well, to work hard. Under the new law – Truth in Sentencing – there are no incentives to participate in rehab and improvement.”
What often goes wrong with this system? When Illinois abolished its parole system in 1978, even people in prison approved of the change, Austen said, because they viewed the system as racist and unjust. ““Parole is a contest of storytelling,” he explained. “The parole board is not an investigative body. It’s supposed to weigh what has happened since the crime was committed, but there’s a catch-22: the crime story, which gets told over and over. And that story doesn’t change.” States that have moved beyond just focusing on the seriousness of the crime have succeeded in significantly increasing their parole rates, but that’s hard to do. Shakeshaft agreed, noting that mass incarceration wasn’t constructed overnight. The standards don’t allow for rehabilitation. Many bills and many policies have kept people inside. We see “catch-22” time and time again, she said.
In 2018, Shakeshaft and the ACLU filed suit against Wisconsin’s parole system, alleging violations of the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments in the system’s treatment of individuals like Cottingham, who had committed crimes as minors and whose immaturity at the time of the crime was not being considered in deciding whether to grant parole. Many of those former juvenile offenders have subsequently been released, thanks in large part to the work of John Tate (who tried to reduce the barriers to such releases) as well as the ACLU. But Wisconsin’s prison population still includes many kids who received excessively long sentences, and those kids are disproportionately non-white. “We have to be intentional about race issues as we consider solutions,” Shakeshaft said.
Why should individuals convicted of a serious crime be given a second chance? “Because people change,” Tate said. “That’s the principle, to be applied universally – when it’s hard, and when it’s easy. I knew going into the role [of Parole Commission chair] that I’d have to take the hit [for controversial decisions],” he added. “Parole commissioners are civil servants, not subject to the whim of politicians. The chair? Not so much.” Tate strongly believes in Bryan Stevenson’s adage, that “We’re all better than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” He also asked, “Is the person seeking parole still the same person who committed the crime? If not, we’re punishing the wrong person.”
Cottingham added that we as a society need the talents and insights of the people in prison. They have a lot to offer, not just despite but also because of their prison experiences, which can make them ideal mentors for others who need help because of traumas, addictions, and social stigmas.
What about the role of victims in parole hearings? “For a crime victim, there is life before the crime and life after it,” Austen said. “Victims are locked into the process of parole. Their statements are always powerful. They’re asking for more punishment, but the system is failing them, too. Victims and criminals are trapped by the same experience. Restorative justice could bring something better.”
How can the correctional system do a better job of rehabilitation? “No program will rehabilitate everyone,” Tate said; “it starts with the person. We need to provide opportunities to help incarcerated people slow down their thinking, evaluate themselves.”
Cottingham testified that most of his experiences during incarceration seemed designed to break people, not to encourage self-evaluation. What finally touched him was a restorative justice circle organized by the Rev. Jerry Hancock. “I had to take an honest, clean look at myself,” Cottingham recalled. “In the circle, I was sitting next to a woman who had been the victim of a burglary. She was shaking the whole time she told the story, she was so traumatized by the experience. I thought, ‘I did that.’”
“What is rehab?” Cottingham mused later. “It’s being honest with oneself. We need trauma-informed care. Rehab in Wisconsin gets an ‘F’ from me. But there is hope; there are good people.”
What about the possibility of recidivism? Statistics show that practically no Wisconsin prisoners released on parole in recent years have been returned to prison for committing a new crime, but they all live with the possibility of being sent back for rule violations. “Your parole officer has your life in his or her hands,” Cottingham said. “When you’re locked up, the P.O. can investigate for 21 days. You can lose your job, your housing [waiting in jail for a decision.] Over 5,000 are in prison in Wisconsin due to rule violations.” Austen said that 25% of those in prison across the U.S. are there for rule violations.
How can we change the system? “Storytelling,” Austen said. Police unions and “tough-on-crime” politicians tend to oppose any form of mercy to former offenders, refusing to grant that people change. “We have to figure out how to tell better stories, stories with emotional appeal,” he said. “Statistics alone can’t change people’s minds.”
And former Parole Chair John Tate added: “We should be talking about what we’re doing – and why. The counter-narrative was so easy to consume.”
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2024 | Information, Life After Prison, Newsletter, Profiles
Get to Know Our 2023 Gala Honorees a Little Bit Better!
By Sherry Reames
Heleema Berg‘s current job title is Recovery Support Specialist at the Wisconsin Resource Center (WRC), a maximum-security institution which provides the best opportunities in Wisconsin for incarcerated people to receive mental health and substance use treatment. Drawing on her own lived experiences of poverty, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and substance and sexual abuse, as well as several years of incarceration, she describes her vocation as “supporting others in recovery and walking with them as they figure it out.”
Heleema doesn’t limit herself to just a few kinds of support! In the past few years she has not only earned state certification as a Peer Support Specialist and Parent Peer Specialist, but has also become certified to train others for these roles. She works with Deb Mejchar, folks from the UW Odyssey Project, and others in the areas of restorative justice, grief support, re-entry parenting, and preventing sex trafficking. Drawing on other parts of her life experience, Heleema has also taken on the role of Native American spiritual leader at the WRC and volunteer spiritual leader at Taycheedah. She has become an Indigenous doula and completed training to work as a doula inside the prison system. She also does advocacy work surrounding justice-impacted individuals and victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
Heleema lives in Green Bay and is the mother of five children, ranging in age from 7 to 25. She says her life motto is, “Do not let anyone put you in a box, including yourself, as you can do anything you want if you work hard for it!”
Catoya Roberts returned to Milwaukee, her hometown, after graduating from Hampton Institute in Virginia and started to make a name for herself as an organizer and community leader. If you look her up online, you will see her identified as an organizer for MICAH and Urban Milwaukee (a role she had from 2011 to 2018), later an associate director of WISDOM with the mission of supporting other local organizers, co-founder of FREE, and national director of Movement Building for the Children’s Defense Fund, with racial equity and the welfare of women and children as focus areas.
Catoya’s current title is director of the Community Justice Council in Milwaukee. That means she now heads an effort to bring together the principle decision-makers in the city who deal with criminal justice — the chief judge, district attorney, public defender, police chief, sheriff, mayor, and other community leaders — with the goal of developing strategic plans to improve public safety and the quality of life for everybody.
Catoya’s dedication to criminal-justice reform has been shaped in large part by her own life experience. Her father was often absent during her childhood because he was in and out of incarceration. Her brother has been repeatedly incarcerated as well because of mental illness, and she is helping to raise his children and trying to save her nephew from the system. Especially close to her heart are two current statewide campaigns: the work of FREE, as it strives in Madison and elsewhere to create healthy, affordable, and safe housing opportunities for re-entering women with children; and efforts to rethink the community supervision system, making it much less intrusive and more humane.
Note: Although our third honoree, Dee Star, was too busy to be interviewed, he is already well known in Madison.
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2024 | Advocacy, Juvenile Justice, Newsletter, Prisons, WISDOM
End Life Sentences for Juveniles By Margaret Irwin
The State of Wisconsin is inching its way toward passing a bill that would end life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles. Current law allows a judge to sentence offenders between 13 and 17 to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or community supervision, no matter how many decades they will serve.
In December 2023, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced Senate Bill 801/Assembly Bill 845. It states that when the court sentences a youthful offender to life imprisonment, it must set a date on which the person will become eligible to be considered for release on parole or community supervision. Normally, this would be after 15-20 years in prison. Passing this bill would not guarantee release, but it creates a mechanism to apply for early release. It would also apply retroactively, opening the possibility of release to several dozen current prisoners who received extreme sentences during their teens.
Passage of SB801/AB845 would bring Wisconsin in line with 28 states that have already banned Juvenile Life Without Parole sentences, including Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The U.S. is the only country in the world that allows such sentences. The bill would also bring Wisconsin law into accord with the U.S. Constitution. In Miller vs. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that imposing a mandatory life sentence without parole on a juvenile constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.
The movement to ban life sentences for juveniles is also based on a growing body of scientific evidence that the brain continues to develop into a person’s mid-20s. Younger people may exhibit immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences. As state Sen. Jesse James, co-author of SB 801 asks, “How is a 15-year-old supposed to understand life without parole when that sentence is literally quadruple the entire time they’ve been alive? People can grow; people can change, especially when their brains are still forming. Juveniles deserve a second chance.”
A report from The Sentencing Project concludes: “The evolving maturing of young adults leads to a sharp decline in criminal tendencies by the late 30s; and therefore, incarceration beyond a period of 15-20 years, even for serious crimes, produces diminishing returns for public safety. The National Research Council is the latest authority to note that long-term sentences serve little purpose other than to reinforce [retribution rather than rehabilitation].”
Similar bills have been introduced in the state Legislature in the past, but they never made it out of committee. Now there is some progress. The Assembly Committee on Judiciary held a hearing on the bill on Feb. 8. James Morgan and Sherry Reames from MOSES and Mark Rice from WISDOM testified in favor of the bill, and many MOSES members contacted their legislators to express their support. Since the legislative session is set to end on March 14, the bill may not pass during this session. However, the gears have been set in motion. As we know in MOSES, progress can be slow, so it’s important to keep our collective foot on the pedal.
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2024 | Newsletter, Racial Equity, Reviews
The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning with Racial Injustice
By Carol Menaker, She Writes Press, 2023
Reviewed by Pam Gates
In 1976, Carol Menaker, a young white woman living in Philadelphia, was summoned for jury duty in a high-profile murder case. The jury was sequestered; she was separated from her husband and her life for the 21 days it took from jury selection to jury decision on the fate of a young Black man, already in prison for murder of a park policeman, who had been charged again in the murder of two white prison wardens.
In her one-page first chapter, Menaker writes: “I was watching for a sign, any sign, that he may not have done the horrible things he was accused of … clues that would tell me how [he] … had got himself in so much trouble. If the clues were there, I didn’t see them. I couldn’t see them. Maybe it was because I was only 24 years old. Or maybe it was because I was white and privileged.”
That jury convicted Frederick Burton. The judge had explained to them that under the law, Burton was guilty because he was present at the murders. Menaker accepted this information and voted with the rest of the jury, including the two African Americans, to convict Freddy Burton and go back to her own life.
Menaker told the story of her jury duty many times during the ensuing years; it had been a difficult experience for her, not because of the decision, but because of the sequestration. But eventually she began to wonder about the man she had convicted. She began researching Frederick Burton, trying to find out who he really was.
She learned that he had been a young husband and father, gainfully employed and a community leader when he was first convicted. She learned that this initial conviction was based on false testimony obtained by brutal police coercion. She learned that it was highly unlikely he had participated in the prison murders – and that the judge’s admonition that Burton’s mere presence made him guilty was wrong. That admonition had been the basis for Menaker’s decision to convict, her basis for urging fellow jurors to the same decision.
What had really gone on in that high-profile case? Menaker describes the politics in 1970s Philadelphia; it was not a good time or place to be African American. The police were brutal, at least in the African American community, and the mayor backed them up. Could an African American judge preside over a fair trial of a Black man, a Black man who had already been convicted of murdering a park police officer, under such circumstances? Menaker does not accuse the judge or other jurors of unfairness. In fact, she tries very hard to be fair to everyone involved, while telling a story in which justice was not served. But as far as is possible, she is telling only her own story – and Burton’s, as well as she is able.
While looking at Burton’s life and circumstances, Menaker also began reflecting on her own past, her own values and attitudes. Growing up, her only contact with African Americans had been as family servants, people dismissed as “other,” certainly by her mother. She and Burton had not been peers; the trial in which she had participated could not have been fair. All she, and likely other jury members as well, wanted was to be done with it so they could move on.
This book reads very fast. It’s easy to relate to Carol Menaker if one is white and middle class, easy to understand her only vague awareness of the powerful forces of racism and police brutality in her community in the ‘70s when she was very young, fairly new in town, and had never been directly exposed to them. It is good to see her growth in awareness and her determination to make a difference for Frederick Burton, and for others — to do something to rectify the worst thing she has ever done.
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2024 | Information, Newsletter, Support MOSES
Featuring a New MOSES Member: The Crossing!
By Margaret Irwin
Welcome to The Crossing – a new member of MOSES! A multifaith, progressive student ministry at UW-Madison, its home is a beautiful, welcoming building that has stood on University Avenue since 1917. The Crossing is affiliated with and supported by three Protestant denominations: the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the American Baptist Church. It welcomes students of any or no religious background to cultivate friendships, deepen their spiritual lives through worship and discussion, and engage in justice advocacy and service.
Currently, three students receive stipends to lead justice work in three areas: labor rights, immigration rights, and student food insecurity. The Crossing provides 1,000 meals monthly in the form of free hot meals, lunches, and frozen meals. The meals come from leftover food that students in the dormitories didn’t purchase.
Executive Director Mike Burch came to The Crossing a year ago from Berkeley, Calif. An American Baptist minister for 30 years, Mike brings a wealth of experience as a nonprofit director, a senior pastor, and a seminary professor. Most surprisingly, at the beginning of his career, he served for a year as UW wrestling coach! Mike is passionate about reform of the criminal-legal system. Next fall, he plans to add additional stipends for student leaders in the areas of incarceration reform, housing accessibility, and racial justice.
It didn’t take Mike long to get connected with Jerry Hancock of the First Congregational United Church of Christ Prison Ministry Project, and with MOSES Organizer James Morgan. This led to The Crossing becoming a member of MOSES, in collaboration with the Prison Ministry Project. Mike is eager to get students involved in the work of MOSES. In April, Talib Akbar will set up a model solitary confinement cell on the first floor of The Crossing, so students can learn about this inhumane treatment of incarcerated people. Mike also wants students to get involved in the issues surrounding re-entry. He hopes to expand work on campus to reach out to students who have been affected by the carceral system, either personally or through family members. He says there are many more such individuals than we might suspect.
To sum up, Mike states that people need to get behind MOSES, which is in a position to have an immediate impact on the criminal-legal system. MOSES has great leadership, he says, and with more funding it will do even greater things. “Let’s get the community behind MOSES!” he concludes.
